Vincent Cassel is Paul Gauguin.
Paris was suffocating him, he no longer had anything left to paint there and he didn't get enough money to live with dignity, much less to support his wife and his five children.
After previous trips to Panama and Martinique, Paul Gauguin He saw it clearly: all his friends, artists of the moment (Bernard, Laval, Van Gogh...) they had to go to Polynesia, to Tahiti, which then, in 1891, was one of the last colonies annexed by France. They had to escape from books and from that faded Paris, they had to live and explore the origin of everything, find and set free the savage they carried within. But only one of them dared to leave: Paul Gauguin.
Gauguin in personal pursuit of him in central Tahiti.
This is how the movie starts Gauguin. trip to Tahiti, by Edouard Deluc (opening October 5), in which Vincent Cassell plays the artist. In 1891, after much talk with all his colleagues, Gauguin is the only one who dares to embark on the adventure. He leaves Paris and goes to Polynesia where, in 18 months, he ended up painting 66 masterpieces that changed the course of painting. 66 paintings, his Tahitian works “that they influenced the fauves, the cubists and marked the arrival of modern art”, Deluc explains.
Just as impoverished and also ill, Gauguin returned to Paris in 1893 transformed, convinced that he had experienced what he was looking for and to exhibit those 66 works at the Durand-Ruel gallery, so that people would understand what he had lived, he wrote Noah, Noah, memories of his trip. However, after raising some money, he left again and that newspaper would not see the light of day until 1920, 17 years after his death.
Tahiti, according to Gauguin or Koké.
Deluc has now taken these memories and adapts them "loosely" in this film that glosses over the artist's controversial relationship with Tahitian girls and women (under 14) and transforms him into a single romance, with Tehura (actress Tuheï Adams), the encounter of that "primitive Eve" that he was looking for and inspires him to create all those works. "I spend the day painting, I live at the pace I want," says this biased Gauguin played by Cassel.
Upon arrival, Gauguin lived in the capital Papeete the first six months, but it was still too civilized for him.
From there he marched towards the center of the island, towards the village of Mataiera and he went on to the wildest part, the Taravao plateau, where he lives around the natives, the Maori who were still left, no longer king. The film also talks about that political moment, about the disappearance of the island's culture and the invasion of the Catholic missions, the French domain.
Tahiti, paradise.
Gauguin was always a traveler and that's why he suffocated in Paris. Others painted the wild side of the human being, but only he explored it in all its consequences, including some that we should not go through.
“By the age of a year Gauguin had already spent six months at sea with his parents: his father, a republican, dies on a ship while fleeing France under Napoleon III. His mother, daughter of the socialist militant and feminist Flora Tristan , takes refuge in Peru, a country that leaves a deep impression in its incessant search for the primitive. There, he lives surrounded by pre-Columbian sculptures and learns cutting and sculpture with daggers”, explains the director.
The artist and the muse, a biased vision.
And yet, it was the beauty of Tahiti that changed him forever. The spectacular nature of the island was captured in the painter's paintings: the green hills surrounded by palm trees and falling into the sea and those deserted beaches. “I will return to the forest to experience calm, ecstasy and art”, Gauguin wrote. And so he did. "I can't be ridiculous because I am two things that are never ridiculous: a child and a savage."
Tahitian women.